Smiley Face (2007): C

There’s exactly one brilliant scene in Smiley Face, in which Ana Farris’ insanely stoned Jane ruminates, with hilariously authentic scattered-train-of-thought, on her fondness for lasagna. The rest of Greg Araki’s film, however, is not only a limp, unfunny time-waster, but it seems barely familiar with the actual experience of being high, indulging in one sequence after another characterized by Farris acting less like a habitual pothead than like a teetotaler attempting to imagine what such a stoner might be like. This can’t fully be pinned on Farris, who does as much as is humanly possible with her one-note role, offering up myriad, semi-charming variations of slack-jawed, heavy-lidded spaciness. Rather, it’s Araki who’s to blame, his script a series of broad, cartoony, sub-Cheech and Chong predicaments – revolving around Jane’s attempts, after scarfing down a plate full of pot cupcakes, to procure money to pay off her dealer – full of chases, coincidences and kooky goings-on that rarely elicit even a half-hearted smile. Smiley Face’s narrative is dimwitted in the wrong way, proceeding with next to no internal logic – for instance, if the supposedly sharp Jane is blotto to the point of being virtually brain-dead, her every decision an example of Looney Tunes nonsense, why hasn’t she just passed out? – and, worse still, too resolutely shallow and trivial to develop its (hinted at, but undeveloped) suggestion that Jane’s drug habit is symptomatic of some larger cultural malaise. Reconfirming his auteurist proclivities, Araki ends things with a Godard shout-out, but by that point, who cares about such smarty-pants gestures? If a pot comedy isn’t funny and/or true, as this one generally is not, it’s by and large worthless.